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Since the new season of house of cards was released on the 14. Of February on Netflix and the major media storm that has been happening around this epic television series. I just wanted to remind people that politics isn’t always about backstabbing and doing what you can to get to the top, there are politicians that are truly there to try and help people.

Don’t get me wrong, as a politically interested person I think house of cards is a brilliant series and deserves all the credit that it is currently getting, Kevin Spacey is brilliant in the role of the ruthless pragmatist Frank Underwood. But the show does depict politicians as either ruthless cunning people that will do anything to get ahead, or rather dimwitted politicians that are just a pawn in the game.

This is a reminder of the other brilliant show called “The West Wing” which premiered back in 1999 and continued until 2006, this show, shows a much nicer and ideological side of politics, in this show the people running the country actually do it because they feel they can help the people, or at least try and help the people in their vision. In this show even the “bad” guys are depicted as “good” or at least with the right intentions.

The political game is shown in “The West Wing”, but with the intention that sometimes politicians have to play the game in order to get their views through, or even to get their bills through. But “The West Wing” is what I would consider the more optimistic of the 2 shows.

I have decided to compare the shows because I feel they have similarities and differences, but both depict how politics are handled in the white house and in congress.

For me the latter shows what the masses thought of politics back when the show aired first, the president at that moment was Bill Clinton, who was a more or less well liked president, and only had 1 or 2 major hiccups in his carrier, a blowjob and that is about it. Whereas now I think people see what politics has become and how lobbyism and corporate interest play a major role in the forming of politics, and this is what “House of Cards” quite well depicts.

For me it is just important to still have the optimistic view on politics, this is because we are constantly over-flooded with how politicians lie or can’t keep to their promises and are only catering to the corporations. I wish politics were more like in “The West Wing”, but I am afraid I have to admit that politics has become more about what “House of Cards” is about.

So I just wanted to remind people that there are still positive sides to politics and that if we can come back to the ideals and ideological opinions of the west wing we can overcome the power mongering that politics has become.